Hey-
I've begun the ardueous trek of starting up my own website, which will be a community like this with the emphasis based mostly on a forum, but will also include blogging software, webmail, and a 'sermons' directory that my friend and I will post to as moderators of this site.

Anyway, as one could imagine, this new site will be an absolute resource CHUGGER. My webspace will be my brother's server, who will host me only because I am providing my own hard drive.

This hard drive will be mounted in /home/freespeak and will be hdb

Anyway, the question.

How does one make an SQL database be stored on ONLY that hdb, as to not interfere with the rest of his server's daily tasks? What is the command in the MySQL shell? Is it even possible?

Any feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Well, I've never done it, but according to this article , since MySQL stores each database in its own directory, you can set up a symlink pointing to another location. You'll just have to make sure that the symlink has the exact same name as the database.

Whoaaaaaa

I'm CERTAINLY not a newbie to MySQL, but those technical docs just go straight over my head.

And the colorful diagrams never help. :-/

Sorry, but could someone rationalize and simplify it for me? I don't kin well to big words and fancy diagrams.

Thanks again, Hangdog

OK, this is how I understand it.......

The MySQL admin (your brother?) would create the necessary databases and give you appropriate permissions. That would create a database directory in the normal MySQL data directory. Now on your new hard drive, you want to create a directory where you really want MySQL to store the data. Once that is done, move the files MySQL created from the MySQL database directory to the new hard drive directory. Finally, replace the MySQL database directory for this database with a link like this:

ln -s /path/to/new/directory databasename

In theory, that should "fool" MySQL into thinking that it is writing to a normal database directory, but in fact is writing to your new hard drive.

As I said, I've never done this, but looking at how MySQL works, I see no reason why this shouldn't do the trick.

ahhh makes perfect sense... thank you very much

In theory, you're right, it should work. Symbollic links rock

Any idea where the SQL satabases are stored by default?

You may have to dig into your my.cnf file to make sure, but at least with the standard Slackware package, the databases are in /var/lib/mysql